Oh Love
by Stephane Richer
Summary: Talk my way out of control, talk myself out of falling in love, falling in love with you. ::Momoi/Harasawa::


Oh Love

Disclaimer: I don't own Green Day's "Oh Love" or Fujimaki Tadatoshi's _Kuroko no Basuke_.

* * *

The trees are blooming. The proper students envy the delinquents their face masks, and the hay fever makes their eyes puffy and noses swollen and throats clogged and itchy. The school year is ending soon and almost everyone feels the urge to move onward, into a new classroom with new companions, students and teachers alike. They will be glad for a change of pace and routine, and for a few weeks of new material before there are tests to create and take and grade.

Harasawa Katsunori hates grading tests. When you've been a teacher teaching the same curriculum for as long as he has, which is most of his adult life, you've seen every wrong answer and miscalculation before, every lack of carrying the one or mixed-up decimal point or incorrect exponent or illegible note. Every year, there will be a few surprise final grades where the smart kids fail and the dumb kids pass with flying colours. Someone will get caught cheating. Someone will hand in all his or her work on the last day it can be counted for any sort of credit.

At least he doesn't get hay fever. But perhaps that's more of a curse than a blessing, because right now he'd rather be outside where the giant plum tree brushes its pale blossoms against his window. They're blooming early this year after a mild winter, and usually he gets to enjoy the trees and sunshine more, sit outside and read his newspaper or play some pick-up soccer with his buddies after work as the sun sets, days still too short to cram everything inside.

And this year, his mind has been poked and prodded more than ever. His patience is growing even thinner than usual, with the annoyance of staying inside on a beautiful day added on top of the usual endless monotony of grading tests. And, of course, her. Her being Momoi Satsuki, of course.

When Harasawa first took the job at Touou, he was twenty-five and had decided he needed a real job. No matter how much he loved basketball, it just wasn't a stable job. He'd already seen too many teammates fall prey to career-limiting or career-ending injuries, and he might as well put his degree to good use. His teammates teased him about how he was doing it to find a girlfriend (because he was perpetually single and for some odd reason had a fairly young fanbase) but really, he had no attraction to high school girls, and hadn't since high school.

Of course, things got awkward once the girls actually started confessing. In his first few years, he was still young and very toned, and they sent him love letters in droves. The male students all would have hated him had he not been a fairly easy grader and a good teacher. As it was, some of them did hate and resent him, but there was nothing Harasawa could do about it. He tried to reject the girls kindly and not mention it after that. On the weekends, he pursued women closer to his own age. Even when the hot girls opened their shirts too far or hitched up their skirts so he could almost see their panties, it still didn't really affect him. Yeah, some of them were hot, but the thought of actually doing anything with them really weirded him out.

And that was until he met her. She'd shown up that first day to the basketball interest meeting, dragging Aomine by his ear, and had plunked down a four hundred page scouting report that she'd done on every single high school basketball player in the prefecture. Usually, Harasawa just took whichever potential managers seemed willing to commit their time to the mundane work, but this girl seemed both willing enough and competent enough to handle the work of the usual three managers, plus some of Harasawa's own work. Her analysis was so deep it made Imayoshi's eyes flutter the tiniest bit open, a miracle in and of itself. But he was not attracted to her in the least bit then. Her enthusiasm was girlish; she dressed and carried herself like she was still in middle school. She was capable of intelligent conversation, and soon became Harasawa's favourite conversational companion on the team. She had none of Imayoshi's creepy maliciousness; her voice was not grating like Wakamatsu's; she kept her train of thought focused, unlike Susa. The conversation was strictly business, strictly basketball. And Harasawa did not fall for her.

But then, things began to change somewhere, slowly. She let her guard down slowly, let the unflappable façade crack a couple of times. And he let the intricacies of her character and aesthetic fascinate him. Sometimes, he cannot help but stare, transfixed, as she walks past the classroom where he teaches, hair blowing out behind her and eyes laughing as she talks with a similarly-aged companion. He is suddenly very glad that she's not taking chemistry this year, because he would not be able to focus on the chemicals in front of him, would pour them all together and kill everyone with poisonous gas or blow up the lab. He's supposed to be giving the team pointers, but she's sitting beside him, and he watches her watch them and he's not even sure she notices his gaze because she is so utterly focused, and her brow is furrowed and he needs to know what she's thinking, which player needs to fix what. The fluorescent light washes out everyone, but she is still so lovely under it as her shoes squeak across the floor.

Harasawa has no clue where to go from here. This must be some odd sort of karma, because sometimes he was a bit harsh and more than a little condescending rejecting all those girls, and now he sees how it is to walk in their shoes, to see someone who's on another plane and another path in life, in another place than you are and to want to reach across and touch them.

What is he going to do without her? He puts down his correction pen so he can weave both hands through his hair over and over. Even disregarding his feelings toward her, which he refuses to name because that will only legitimise them, her expertise has elevated this team. He often wonders what he ever did before her, how he scouted opponents. He remembers scouring the internet for video and having a couple of his previous managers stake out practices undercover. It still wasn't in any way close to being this effective. Yes, their players' skills have increased, and he cannot shove aside the fact that she's in the same class as Sakurai and Aomine, who are probably the two most eccentric and talented players he's ever coached, but her scouting has won games they could not have won before and has made near-sure victories no-doubt wins. Split-second analysis from an observer is invaluable (and undervalued) in basketball. She's almost better at observing and correcting the tiny flaws in the Touou players' games than Harasawa is.

She had asked to meet him here, after her last test. She will ace them all, of course (many times he's asked her to tutor Aomine; each time she rolls her eyes because she's already tried that way too many times and it's enough of a struggle to get him to come to class in the first place) and that will be that. She will be off to a prestigious university and then go on to great things. He's had a few students like this, obviously meant for a bigger stage—but he's always been content to let them move on and live their lives away from him. But what could she possibly want? There are many things he hopes, but the only thing he lets himself think is that she could perhaps want to volunteer as an assistant coach—but, no. Why would she do that? Basketball has consumed her life since middle school, or possibly before that. She has no plans to continue with it that he knows of, and if anyone deserves a day (or year, or lifetime) off from basketball it's her.

He hears a knock at the door. The clock on the wall reads 12:15. She's right on time. "Come in!" he calls, and quickly adjusts his tie and fixes his hair.

The door opens slowly, and he can't stop the feeling from spreading inside of him. She's wearing her hair down today, and it cascades over her shoulders and breasts and waist before fading out at her hips. Her uniform is impeccably ironed, and she carries her schoolbag on one shoulder. "Harasawa-san." She bows.

"Ah, Momoi-san. Please, have a seat."

She sits down across from him, and then she then places her entire bag on top of the desk and smiles shyly. "I brought you all of my scouting reports."

He simply stares at her.

"I don't know if you want them, and I was going to throw them out, but then I thought they might still be useful…" she trails off.

He smiles back. "Can you just stay and help me coach the team?"

She laughs, not one of those dainty schoolgirl giggles but something solid, more tangible almost. Through the windows, the plum blossoms catch the light and cast shadows on her face.

"Thank you," he says, levity disappearing from his face. "You've been one of my best students."

Her eyes are watering. "Oh, Harasawa-san," she says. "You've been a great coach. You taught me so much about basketball, and I had a wonderful time with you."

His breath catches in his throat, and he coughs. Before he knows what he's doing, he's scratching out digits on a spare post-it with his correction pen and hands it to her. "Listen, if you ever need anything, or if you want to take me up on that coaching offer…just give me a call, okay?"

And she smiles again, and maybe he's fooling himself but it's not one of those "this is awkward, but I'll accept and then throw out the paper" smiles. It's real. She reaches out and clasps one of his hands in hers, and oh, they're warm and small and firm and he hopes he's not blushing. Then, as if realising how forward the gesture is, her cheeks darken and she hastily withdraws her hands and bows, exiting.

* * *

She pretends to want nothing to do with basketball at first, so they talk about other things. Her schooling (she wants to be a lawyer; he is sure she will be ruthless and thorough), mutual acquaintances (she really worries too much about Aomine), politics (their debates sometimes get a little heated), their lives. Eventually, though, they do end up talking about basketball, high school basketball in particular, which she still totally follows. She can't not. They talk about strategy, and he takes notes. He invites her to the games; she declines.

She holds out until the Winter Cup, and in the first intermission of their very first game against Shutoku she calls him up and yells at him for utilizing the wrong offensive plan (they're behind by four). They pull ahead by nine at the end of the second, and he calls her back to discuss what to do in the second half.

He tries to pay her, to hire her and give her an official part-time job (he'll pay her out of his own pocket if he has to, but the school's budget isn't that tight and they always tell him he's welcome to hire an assistant if he wants to because the best programs have three or four coaches at once) but she will have none of it. She's doing it for pure love of the game, she says with a wry smile that sends shivers down his spine because he just can't get over her. She tells him (is she flirting with him? It's hard to tell when he hasn't really been in the dating game for a while) that she'll just keep letting him pay for coffee or drinks or food or whatever they end up getting.

A year after graduation, they start calling each other by their first names. They can't remember who started it, because they'd been doing it in their minds for quite some time now, getting used to the feel of the name on their tongues. And they've been touching each other lightly, too, on the thigh and the inside of the wrist and the upper arm and the shoulder and the top of the head and that somehow turns into hand-holding.

They aren't going to rush this. They don't talk about it, what it means for them, for a while. It's too precious a thing to be believed at first, like a golden pebble among the gravel.

But then one day she pulls his lips into a kiss, and it's worth the wait. But how could they have waited this long?


End file.
